>> mCORE!® Communications Server
The mCORE!® Communications Server acts as the central communications hub for the mNOW!® Mobile Framework 2008. Based upon Microsoft Windows Communication Foundation—Microsoft’s implementation of the industry standard Web Services 2.0 specification—it provides secure, reliable communications between the different modules of the framework and is designed to accommodate all deployment scenarios from small local deployments to large mission critical deployments that require enterprise scalability, high availability, and redundancy.
The mCORE! Communications Server also acts as the gateway to the framework’s three repositories:
- Transaction Queue
The Transaction Queue provides an interim repository for outbound and inbound transactions. This approach enables higher performance through the preprocessing of dispatch data to ensure immediate transfer to occasionally connected devices and more consistent and reliable processing of submitted data, especially data transmitted over high latency networks or in peaks and valleys common to batch, shift, or time zone based usage patterns.
- Metadata Repository
The Metadata Repository persists all of the system information collected and managed by the mNOW! Mobile Framework. This includes the logical organization of the device community, configuration settings for a variety of modules and services, communications and integration activities, and many system errors. A configurable set of archival processes ensure that stale or obsolete data is continually removed to enable tuning for optimal performance and operation.
- Replication Repository (optional)
The optional Replication Repository utilizes Microsoft’s SQL Server 2005 Merge Replication to maintain larger quantities of lookup and/or validation data sometimes required for rich, robust mobile applications. Snapshot data for inventory, asset, price and/or categorization can be continually updated with the appropriate changeset information to ensure that only modified data is transferred to the device, significantly improving synchronization performance and reducing data transmission costs.
